First Friday with authors Alex Taylor and Emilia Phillips and music by Raison D'Etre
$10
$5 with student ID
Alex Taylor is a fresh new voice, not just in Kentucky but in American Literature. His precise observations, deep insights, and confident prose lift his fiction to a soaring height. The characters are real people enduring real dilemmas: resourceful, hopeful, and compassionate. Taylor writes with generosity and understanding of rural and small town life.
Like a room soaked in the scent of whiskey, perfume, and sweat, Alex Taylor’s America is at once intoxicating, vulnerable, and full of brawn. The stories in his latest book,The Name of the Nearest River, reveal the hidden dangers in the coyote-infested fields, rusty riverbeds, and abandoned logging trails of Kentucky. There we find tactile, misbegotten characters, desperate for the solace found in love, revenge, or just enough coal to keep an elderly woman’s stove burning a few more nights.
Alex Taylor lives in Rosine, Kentucky. He has worked as a day laborer on tobacco farms, as a car detailer at a used automotive lot, as a sorghum peddler, at various fast food chains, as a tender of suburban lawns, and at a cigarette lighter factory. He holds an MFA from The University of Mississippi and now teaches at Western Kentucky University. His work has appeared in Carolina Quarterly, American Short Fiction, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere.
About Emilia Phillips
Emilia Phillips lives in Richmond, Virgina where she is an MFA poetry student at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming from Asheville Poetry Review, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Unsaid Magazine, Pedestal Magazine, Poetry Miscellany, and elsewhere. She was named the 2009 Discovery Poet by Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts.
About Raison D'Etre
Violet Rae Downey, Vickie Ellis, and Roberta Schultz are three women who live to sing together. Described by one critic as “divinely stirring,” their singing seems to define this team of singer songwriters. According to Mike Breen of Cincinnati CityBeat, the folk trio offers “some of the finest three-part harmony singing you’ll likely ever hear.” However, when these women invite you around their hearth of heart, it's for the purpose of sharing life’s journey through original songs about love, loss, and redemption. Sometimes they even find redemption by "googling themselves" or by assuring us all that bad days are caused when "mercury is retrograde again." These women view the "tallside" of life with a top-of-the-world perspective and a healthy dose of humor. Even their carefully selected covers from Mark Weierman, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Jesse Winchester welcome the audience into a world where dogs are "twice the human being that you are," a drunken cafe-dweller plots her metamorphosis, space ships save the environment, and a woman decides it's OK to be "an old gray grandma as long as you'll be my gray grandpa." Traditional folk songs, a capella swing tunes, and Shaker hymns round out their versatile repertoire, all delivered in their pure Kentucky blend.